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  1. Re:*drool* on Intel's Haswell-E Desktop CPU Debuts With Eight Cores, DDR4 Memory · · Score: 2

    A large part of that is because recent improvements in computing have come in terms of efficiency rather than raw number crunching ability. Being able to have a Xeon machine with dual GPUs run well with a 450w power supply versus a 1500w power supply is a prime example. Desktops that run in 25w versus 450w is another such example. Yes, there certainly have been GREAT advancements over the past few years and those shouldn't be overlooked, but the emphasis has been around smaller, lighter and more efficient, with a 5% YoY gain in performance while you're at it.

    Gone are the days of once every 18 months a computer being twice as fast.
    Instead we have the days of a computer with a battery that runs twice as long, boot in half the time, and faster wireless connections (some that even outperform their wired counterparts).

    The reason why people *needed* to upgrade historically on such a rapid cadence was because technology was evolving at such a rapid pace. Those who would build the tools that everyone else wanted to use were geeks themselves and wanted to be on the latest and greatest, exploiting the advantages that the rapidly advancing technology would provide for them. Advances like MMX or SSE, or for that matter the move from 16-bit to 32-bit instruction sets gave some excellent benefits to those early developers as it allowed for programmers to design complex operations more easily as well as simply do certain things faster, letting applications like Excel deal with much larger data sets and perform comparisons instantaneously instead of the previous "Calculating, please wait." prompts that users would experience. Then, somewhere along the way these hardware architecture improvements no longer were a requirement for the vast majority of applications to run effectively, or even for developers to specifically target applications against. It became more of a minimum being "on this hardware, this runs 'well enough'" as opposed to "it just won't run".

    At present, GPGPU acceleration does much the same thing for us today as the architectural changes did for us during the late 90's and early 2000's. When someone says "I need more raw power", that's usually where they turn to in computing space any more. There is certainly the case for x86, PowerPC, ARM and other conventional architectures and they remain at the core of every computer, but the large scale deployments that need massive number crunching capabilities are moving GPGPU. (See scientific computing, clustering, high performance computing, ...)

  2. Re: ok, so, what now on Astronomers Find What May Be the Closest Exoplanet So Far · · Score: 1

    If we're being fanciful, then we could just as easily say "it took humans 4 billion years and change to colonize the Western Hemisphere of planet Earth. The fact that they didn't for most of that is irrelevant." Or substitute 13 billion years instead and say "the fact that neither existed for most of that is irrelevant." The fact still remains that in cosmological terms, things have been around for a really, really, really long time in comparison to the minute instant that we as a species have existed, let alone been able to contemplate questions like how long we as a species have been around in comparison to the age of the universe!

  3. Re: ok, so, what now on Astronomers Find What May Be the Closest Exoplanet So Far · · Score: 1

    You're off by a decimal place there in how long humans have existed on this planet.

  4. Re:That's not how science works on Underground Experiment Confirms Fusion Powers the Sun · · Score: 2

    Science is intended more to adapt an actual "theory" over time to better suit the evidence that it is presented with until it increasingly encompasses all edge cases that relate to the topic in question. That "adaption" can be considered disproving with an immediate re-creation of an alternate theory moments later to encompass the changing circumstances. In that narrow world view, than yes, disproving of a scientific theory can happen quite regularly, simply because there's a LOT of science going on.

    On the flip side, actually "proving" something is exceptionally hard work. It is saying that at no point, ever, under any circumstances in this or any conceivable universe, with any natural or unnatural influence could this situation *EVER* take place for *ANY* reason. These are the rules, these are how things behave, and this is how things will always, and forever behave; EXACTLY like this and there's not a damn thing that anyone including the hand of God himself could do to change that.

    Now think about that for a second and the level of difficulty involved in actually "proving" something and considering it "proved", solved forever and ever, and letting us as a species move on to bigger and better things. And that's ultimately the problem. Saying that something is "proved" means that there is nothing more that could ever be known about that topic, and that nothing could ever impact that field, be it further advances anywhere else, supernatural influence, extra dimensional characteristics, weird things that we haven't even considered possible... In most cases a theory remains "good enough". Gravity is one such theory. We know that it exists, we know how it works, we know how to calculate it, we know how to utilize it's traits for all kinds of things. But "proving" that water goes downhill ... It's something that we take for granted and require to base civilization as a whole on, through irrigation and plumbing. Something doesn't need to be "proved" to be immeasurably useful in the daily lives of incalculable people over countless generations. You may think that this is getting pedantic, and it is, but at the same point, it is the difference in Science between "Proving" a theory and not.

    Referring to a simple and previously untested idea as what you've described in your swan scenario as a "theory" is what is ultimately damaging the credibility of the term in public perception.

  5. Re:what's wrong with cherry picking? on CenturyLink: Comcast Is Trying To Prevent Competition In Its Territories · · Score: 2

    What CenturyLink states in their complaint isn't with regards to "rich" and "poor" neighborhoods, it's about being able to build in one geographic area concurrently without needing to hire exponentially more staff. Building concurrently across a large geographic area requires a large amount of resources in terms of surveying, project management, construction, validation, installation, testing, engineering, laying pipe, road work, pole work (in many cases with cooperation with various other organizations and their respective labor), possible availability of heavy construction equipment, lead time on supplies (copper, fiber, ...) ... And when in certain regions of the country when you only have 6 months of the year to do such work due to frost concerns, it makes things much more difficult when considering very large projects spanning an entire market. Comcast's insistence of concurrency or nothing means "same season for everyone in a market or you don't do it."

    In one case, it's a nice aspect of Universal Access to say that *everyone* must receive access from incumbent carriers for a reasonable cost, in a reasonable timeframe for the same price as other customers in that market. It is also nice that someone is pressing for things like that to take place, however the spirit was always intended for rural areas to receive connectivity that would normally be ignored due to the high costs of doing so relative to major metropolitan areas, not as a way of stifling competition between two incumbents.

    The intent behind these rules has become lost. While electricity or phone lines have remained fungible, additional telecommunications services have been added to "phone lines" with one breath so that said lines could be subsidized by tax dollars, and yet declared "entertainment services" in another breath so that they could be unregulated.

    Through updating the law to remove either of these loopholes, the first of many steps can be taken towards improving the situation. Ultimately, major telecommunications policy reforms must be adopted to reflect the way the world functions today.

  6. Re: The death of leniency on U.S. Senator: All Cops Should Wear Cameras · · Score: 1

    And as a politician, it could safely go either way. She could either be adept at manipulating everyone for her own aspirations, or what you see could in fact be what you get... Without studying her particular voting record and speaking history, it is difficult to say for sure.

  7. Re:The death of leniency on U.S. Senator: All Cops Should Wear Cameras · · Score: 1

    You know that, and I know that, and 95% of the general public know that, and that's an extremely admirable trait and should be a requirement in it's own right. But does Senator Caskill know that?

    Her comment of "Everywhere I go people now have cameras. And police officers are now at a disadvantage, because someone can tape the last part of an encounter and not tape the first part of the encounter. And it gives the impression that the police officer has overreacted when they haven't." seems to indicate otherwise.

    It seems to indicate that the poor, defenseless disenfranchised police officers are the victims in all of this, and won't someone please think of *their* rights to be safe from the vindictive John Q. Public who seeks nothing more than harass those underpaid and under appreciated public servants who put their lives on the line ever single day?

  8. Re: We need faster-than-light travel on Exomoon Detection Technique Could Greatly Expand Potential Habitable Systems · · Score: 1

    We completely agree on the subject that robotic exploration is extremely important and can be done in a far more effective fashion than human exploration at this time. However at a certain point we also need to accept that prior to reaching out to targets beyond our star system (let alone specifically for inhabitable worlds that we as a species could one day hope to colonize!) we should also consider looking at some of our celestial neighbors. Very comprehensive studies can be conducted on our own Solar System and places that can be exploited within our lifetimes in comparison to the ice age that it would take to travel the 40,680,272,100,000 km (4.3 light years) to get to the nearest star, which *may* house a planet 0.04 AU from it's star with a surface temperature of 1200 C, but more likely we'd need to venture the leap ice age or two to reach the 144,651,479,000,000 km (15.29 light years) bringing us to the closest known planet. Even if we could somehow find some way, somehow of accelerating to just 1% the speed of light and let robot probes explore and relay back the data, we're still talking about 153 years to reach there. And the level of effort to accomplish that engineering feet is frankly well beyond us as a species considering the "success rate" that we have at having probes successfully reach other planets in our Solar System. We need to take smaller steps. Goals are great, I love goals, I love lofty goals in fact, but there needs to be specific actionable steps to be able to execute upon those goals and at present there haven't been any. Just layers upon layers of political spin.

  9. Re:We need faster-than-light travel on Exomoon Detection Technique Could Greatly Expand Potential Habitable Systems · · Score: 2

    It's also worth noting that even ignoring the hard radiation concerns, we as a species have had a really hard time simply leaving our Solar System, let alone considering the undertaking that would be involved with reaching a planet in another System, with living, breathing humans! The emphasis on putting more Kepler class satellites in orbit before we're willing to as a species commit to designing a launch vehicle that would allow us to return a human to the surface of the Moon, let alone commit to long term habitation there, then there isn't much point considering the billions of dollars of effort required today on the intellectual jerk-off session of "are there 4,781 habitable exoplanets or 3,781,574 habitable exoplanets *AND* exomoons?" Getting us as a species back to the moon, let alone another planet in our Solar System is a requirement before we consider the several orders of magnitude differences in engineering effort, understanding, skill and expertise of getting a person to another star system. And once we start to tackle those sorts of problems, the problems like getting a more complete view of the night sky, or better satellites with more up-to-date satellites solves itself.

  10. Re:Why can't hydrogen cool? on The Star That Exploded At the Dawn of Time · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's deceptive. At this point in time, the universe was quite small relatively speaking. As such, the density of those materials was still sufficiently high that the materials were in a persistent plasma state even though they weren't a "star", however fusion was still taking place converting Hydrogen to Helium. At this point, we're talking about all matter in the Universe occupying something not much larger than the Milky Way after all, maybe a little larger considering that we're talking about very, very fast expansion of the universe and the difference of a second amounts to a light year or so of growth. As the Universe continued to expand outwards and the material became less dense, it allowed for the material to actually split apart from one giant clump of hydrogen, helium and lithium and begin to actually get some empty space. As that empty space formed, then this plasmatic cloud could coalesce into the first stars. As long as there was these plasma clouds and not "empty space", then yes, there was "nothing" yet in which the material could *cool* into.

  11. Re:Just don't deal with Americans on Comcast Training Materials Leaked · · Score: 1

    "My fellow Earthicans, we enjoy so much freedom it's almost sickening. We're free to choose which hand our sex-monitoring chip is implanted in. And if we don't want to pay our taxes, why, we're free to spend a weekend with the Pain Monster." ~Richard Nixon

  12. Guns don't kill people, apes with guns kill people..

  13. Re:Cue or queue: What other design patent holders? on Samsung Announces Galaxy Alpha Featuring Metal Frame and Rounded Corners · · Score: 1

    One signal can spawn a queue to form, and a queue need not contain multiple parties, simply a party queueing.

    Example 1: A cop beats up an unarmed black man on a street corner in Harlem mid-day because he "looked at him wrong", one act leads to a larger action from multiple parties. (Signal -> Queue of Multiple Parties)
    Example 2: Said cop comes back to the station, gets a warning and is told "don't do it again or you'll be suspended." (A queue of a single element relying on a conditional signal.)

  14. Re:Cue or queue: What other design patent holders? on Samsung Announces Galaxy Alpha Featuring Metal Frame and Rounded Corners · · Score: 1

    cue = signal.
    queue = line.

  15. Re:25 cm resolution on Google's Satellites Could Soon See Your Face From Space · · Score: 5, Informative

    The average human head is 14.5cm x 23cm x 20cm, so you are quite correct that it would mean that the average human head would occupy less than 1 pixel regardless of which axis it was observed across.

    The largest recorded human head was 15.9cm x 25.5cm x 23.9cm, meaning that said person could require a second pixel, if they were observed in the appropriate axis.

    It is important to note that if a person was observed laying down on the ground, they would occupy *up to* 10 pixels in the case of the world's tallest person, but the average would only require 6.

  16. Re:but... my face is smaller than 25 cm? on Google's Satellites Could Soon See Your Face From Space · · Score: 5, Funny

    Shhh... You aren't supposed to bring facts into a "ZOMFG SCARY HEADLINE!" debate!

  17. Re:High success rate or lots of unknowns? on 40% Of People On Terror Watch List Have No Terrorist Ties · · Score: 2

    Do you have any idea how hard it is to actively watch 680,000 people every moment of the day? We are talking about 1 / 10,000 people on this planet are on that list for god's sake!

  18. Re:High success rate or lots of unknowns? on 40% Of People On Terror Watch List Have No Terrorist Ties · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Not necessarily, it means "links / associations" to terrorists.

    Example:
    Jeff is a Terrorist.
    Jeff has a brother named Bill.
    Bill has a wife named Jessica, a child named Mary, friends named Sarah, Mitchell, and Parker, a boss named Paul, goes to a bank on 53rd st. who employs 31 people, he goes to a grocery store on 17th ave. who employs 44 people, ...

    This could very well be controlled spin to ensure that the numbers are propped up to make it look like they are mostly accurate based on the undefined term "links / associations", which could be as loose or as specific as you want it to be.

    One would hope that that would mean providing aid in some way rather than "I know him", or "I know someone who knows him", or worse, "I've once spoken to him" or "I've once spoken to someone whose spoken to him" but we frankly don't know.

    Simply a devils advocate answer on my part. May very well be that the remaining parties on the list are there for good reason and the 40% here are purely accidental inclusions. I'd personally suspect that there's an ex-girlfriend or two that made the list somehow, someway to otherwise make life hard following a bad breakup.

  19. Re: cretinous because on Verizon Throttles Data To "Provide Incentive To Limit Usage" · · Score: 2

    "I have altered the deal. Pray that I do not alter it further."

  20. Re: Why? on Georgia Tech Researchers Jailbreak iOS 7.1.2 · · Score: 2

    And there's other apps like Flex that gets around these restrictions with ease.

  21. Re: Confused about 1.1 million amount on Household Robot Jibo Nets Over $1 Million On Indiegogo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Sure, there are a lot of accounts created to prop up the sales numbers but aren't claiming rewards to otherwise make the project look more awesome. There is actual investors to this company, and they are likely looking for a return on their investment. Propping up their own campaign to make their company look more powzers to the media, thereby getting more presales doesn't exactly seem that far fetched. Either that or there are a lot of people who believe in what these guys are doing and don't want the product in the end.

  22. Re: Why? on New SSL Server Rules Go Into Effect Nov. 1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If all of those devices were centrally managed, sure. Let's say that instead you are a college, with dorms, and an internal network that those in the dorms can use with direct access to things like Mail and whatever, or a BYOD scenario where users are allowed to use their cell phones to get email and even be on wifi, but you want to respect your employees privacy on their private purchased devices rather than adding them to an MDM.

    Do you really want to bug those user's repeatedly with self signed cert validation prompts or just say "okay, $30 / year is worth avoiding the helpdesks"?

    In most cases, yes, a CA and group policies makes the most sense though and should be the answer. There are just a few fringe cases where it is easier to pay the few bucks than waste the time explaining why the user is in fact safe and just press okay.

  23. Re:How do you on The Daily Harassment of Women In the Game Industry · · Score: 2

    Using terminology like "everyone" is the problem here. In these cases, there are a few outlandish instances that stand out saying "this is horrific", a few "this is bad" instances, some questionable ones that could go either way, and an incalculable number of "these are perfectly fine".

    Brianna Wu saying "every man" is just like a racist saying "every Jew", and it also makes it difficult to take what are certainly very real issues seriously. But at the same point, she was able to point to 4 problems over a long career, not "every day I show up to work and am confronted by dozens of threats of rape, torture, or other sadistic behavior by unknown random people". And yet when someone told her that under no circumstances would they ever have sex with her, even after her death she responds by being afraid to go out in public after dark. That seems more like an "anti-rape" threat or a "just leave me the hell alone, it's never gonna happen" message than one to be concerned about.

    Is she overreacting, perhaps. Are there more cases that she didn't feel inclined to mention, perhaps. Are the things that she mentioned "severe", yes. Should they be taken seriously, yes. But at the same point, they should be taken seriously against the individuals who levied those statements, not against an entire group. She accuses all men of being sexist, but in that statement she is herself showing that she herself is sexist of men and feels that she should be treated differently than any person regardless of gender.

    Workplace problems should be taken seriously, and as the leader of the studio it is her place to handle them. If she isn't willing to do so, then she can either hire someone into an HR role or take her comments to an existing HR person to let them address it instead.

  24. Re:Pft on The Daily Harassment of Women In the Game Industry · · Score: 0

    Scott: My... mom and dad are... dead?
    Cartman: I came just in time to see Mr. Denkins giving his report to Officer Barbrady. And of course, to steal the bodies... After a night with the hacksaw, I was all ready to put on my Chili Con Carnival, so that I could tell you personally about your parents' demise! And of course, feed you your chili. Do you like it? Do you like it, Scott? I call it, "Mr. & Mrs. Tenorman Chili."
    Scott: Oh my God! Oh my God!!
    Cartman: Nyahnyahnyahnyah nyah nyah! I made you eat your parents! Nyahnyahnyahnyah nyah nyah!
    Stan: Jesus Christ, dude!
    Scott: My mom and dad are dead! No! NOOO!!
    Thom: Uhm, excuse me?
    Stan: Who are you?
    Johnny: We're that band, Radiohead.
    Scott: Jesus!
    Ed: Jeez, what a li'l crybaby!
    Colin: Are you gonna cry all day, crybaby??
    Thom: You know, everyone has problems; it doesn't mean you have to be a little crybaby about it.
    Ed: Come om, guys, let's go. This kid is totally not cool.
    Thom: Yeah, that's the most uncool kid I've ever met.
    Phil: Little crybaby!
    Scott: No, wait! Waaiittt!! Oh my God, Oh my Gaawwwd!! Noooo!
    Cartman: Yes! Yesss!! Oh, let me taste your tears, Scott! Mm, your tears are so yummy and sweet.

  25. Re:They need exactly 63 999 employees on Ask Slashdot: How Many Employees Does Microsoft Really Need? · · Score: 4, Informative

    64KiB = 65536 Bytes
    64K = 64,000

    In no unit of measurement is 64K(anything) = 65635.
    65535 is however the maximum value expressible by an unsigned 16-bit binary number.